Melissa and Justin led a wonderfully engaging discussion on Tuesday. They showed a couple of clips from three "futuristic" movies (Thias, Metropolis, and Things to Come), which illustrated some of the more social and cultural aspects of the week's readings. It was a great way to bridge the essays. When I got home and opened up a recent issue of Information Week, the following ad looked a little too familiar:
How similar does the space in the ad look to the technology-enhanced worlds imagined during the early decades of the 20th century? Do we still aspire to create such high-tech, white-glove, production environments? Have we already reached that place? I'm thinking specifically about the environments in which processor chips and other fine-tolerance micro-electronics are produced.A few pages into the same issue, I had to laugh when I found this two-page ad:
We continue to assign human characteristics to technology... this ongoing theme of the "computer as brain." Somehow I think Wells imagined something physically bigger than a server, but the essence of his interconnected knowledge base is still there.
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